by QANTA A. AHMED Qanta A. Ahmed, an associate professor of medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of In the Land of Invisible Women.

March 10, 2017

Founded in Egypt in 1928 and with branches or affiliates in over 70 nations, the Muslim Brotherhood today masquerades as a legitimate Islamic institution and a benign democratic actor. It is neither.

Aside from the group’s well-documented links to the financing of terrorism, it was the Brotherhood that birthed modern-day Islamism, a supremacist totalitarian ideology that seeks to undermine pluralist societies and impose hardline theocratic regimes.

The United States should designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization (FTO). In the doctrine of political Islam, or Islamism, the faith must be expressed through statehood, a concept conspicuously absent from both the Koran and most of Islam’s 1,400-year history.

Hostile to secularism, and steeped in anti-Semitism, Islamists exploit democratic institutions to further their sectarian aims. They have no intention to share power and every intention to subject nation-states to an invented sharia.

——————————————————————————–
Understanding the Caliphate Curve
Posted: 19 Jan 2016 09:26 AM PST
A report by the Tony Blair Faith Foundation found that the Syrian rebels were mostly Islamic Jihadists and that even if ISIS were defeated there were 15 other groups sharing its worldview that were ready to take its place.

The official ISIS story, the one that we read in the newspapers, watch on television and hear on the radio, is that it’s a unique group whose brand of extremism is so extreme that there is no comparing it to anything else. ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. Or with anything else. It’s a complete aberration.

Except for the 15 other Jihadist groups ready to step into its shoes in just one country.

Islamic Supremacist organizations like ISIS can be graded on the “Caliphate curve”. The Caliphate curve is based on how quickly an Islamic organization wants to achieve the Caliphate. What we describe as “extreme” or “moderate” is really the speed at which an Islamic group seeks to recreate the Caliphate.

ISIS is at the extreme end of the scale, not because it tortures, kills and rapes, but because it implemented the Caliphate immediately. The atrocities for which ISIS has become known are typical of a functioning Caliphate. The execution of Muslims who do not submit to the Caliph, the ethnic cleansing and sexual slavery of non-Muslims are not aberrations. They are normal behavior for a Caliphate.

The last Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, was selling non-Muslim girls as sex slaves after the invention of the telephone. A New York Times report from 1886 documented the sale of girls as young as twelve, one of them with “light hazel eyes, black eyebrows and long yellow hair”. An earlier report from the London Post described Turks, “sending their blacks to market, in order to make room for a newly-purchased white girl”. This behavior is not a temporary aberration, but dates back to Mohammed’s men raping and enslaving non-Muslim women and young girls as a reward for fighting to spread Islam.

Who Lost the Saudis?

Iran and Russia have an interest in toppling the House of Saud.

Jan. 4, 2016

That headline question may seem premature, but it’s worth asking if only to reduce the odds that the Saudis are lost as we enter the last perilous year of the Obama Presidency. Iran and Russia have an interest in toppling the House of Saud, and they may be calculating whether President Obama would do anything to stop them.

This comes to mind watching the furious reaction by Iran and its allies to Saudi Arabia’s New Year execution of 47 men for terrorism. Most of the condemned were Sunnis, including members of al Qaeda, but the Saudis also executed prominent Shiite cleric Nemer al-Nemer, who had led a Shiite uprising in 2011.

“The divine hand of revenge will come back on the tyrants who took his life,” said Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday, among many other denunciations across the Shiite Middle East. Protesters ransacked and set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran before police belatedly stopped them. The Saudis responded by cutting off diplomatic relations with Iran.

Nouri al-Maliki, the Iranian ally and former Prime Minister of Iraq, put regime change on the table by saying the execution “will topple the Saudi regime as the crime of executing the martyr al-Sadr did to Saddam” Hussein. He was referring to the death of another prominent Shiite cleric in Iraq in 1980.

Iran already has ample reason to want to topple the Saudis, who are its main antagonist in the Shiite vs. Sunni conflict that has swept the region amid America’s retreat. The two are fighting a proxy war in Yemen, after a Saudi-led coalition intervened to stop a takeover by Iran’s Houthi allies. The Saudis are also the leading supporter of the non-Islamic State Sunnis who are fighting Syria’s ally Bashar Assad. Russia and Iran are allied with Assad.

BOOK REVIEW: Making David Into Goliath,

How the World Turned Against Israel

by Joshua Muravchik

Turning Against Israel

The downward trajectory of global prestige

Ronald Radosh

Ronald Radosh is the coauthor, with Allis Radosh, of A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel.

September 8, 2014, Vol. 19, No. 48

When Joshua Muravchik wrote this book, he could not have known how timely it would turn out to be. He would not have been surprised, however, by the worldwide condemnation of Israel for its “disproportionality” and “lack of restraint” in response to recent Hamas rocket attacks. He writes that “Hamas’ unyielding avowal of intent to eradicate Israel, made real by a barrage of rocket fire over the border, prompted Israel to . . . launch recurrent strikes at terrorists and their facilities,” and, next, to launch Operation Cast Lead (2008-09), “an invasion of Gaza aimed at crippling Hamas’ offensive apparatus.” The response was a rebuke of Israel by such figures as Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and Kofi Annan, as well as by the British press, the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the worldwide left, and the infamous Goldstone Report (later repudiated by Judge Goldstone himself). In fighting back against Hamas, so the narrative went, Israel alone was guilty of “war crimes.”

The subject to which Muravchik devotes Making David into Goliath is why and how the world turned against the Jewish state. At its beginning in 1948, Israel had broad global support; in America, both Republicans and Democrats, including the entire liberal/left-wing community, supported it. Israel’s story became familiar to Americans when, a decade after the country’s birth, Leon Uris’s novel Exodus became a worldwide sensation and bestseller that outsold even Gone with the Wind and was subsequently adapted into a movie starring Paul Newman. Uris’s depiction of the heroic struggle of Palestine’s Jews to build a state out of the existing Yishuv in Palestine moved people all over the world, creating great sympathy for Israel, especially in the United States.

The question Muravchik raises is: Why did this positive feeling erode, both here and in Europe? After Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, the narrative that was quickly adopted was not that of 1948, in which beleaguered Israel valiantly fought for its survival as a state against the Goliath of invading Arab powers. It was replaced by the opposite: Israel had been transformed into Goliath, using its superior power to defeat and destroy Palestinians who were fighting for their own people. Suddenly, the Arab powers had become David, standing against the Israeli behemoth. (more…)